An had kept the packaging for the bathroom tap because Yansheng said he would replace it when he came home. In her Guangzhou apartment, the tap dripped into a blue bowl while she spoke to Yanchuan on video.
“You can get someone to do that,” he said.
“I know.”
He heard the rebuke only after saying it. She was showing him the room because they were looking for dates, not asking him to solve her plumbing.
She turned the camera toward the calendar. Thursday, October 29: a school meeting reminder, a delivery slot, nothing about her husband. His visit had been too ordinary to write down. He had been away for work before. She bought enough fruit for four people when he returned, although there were only three of them, because he always forgot to eat it abroad.
“He asked me to leave Friday afternoon clear,” she said. “He thought he might miss the morning flight, but he said we could still collect the boy together.”
“Did he sound worried?”
“He sounded annoyed about a report. He also complained about the shower. I don’t know how to divide those things now.”
Yanchuan wrote her words rather than an interpretation. In the company’s account, a private change of plans had become a useful possibility. An was trying to describe the person who would have made such a choice.
She brought up a recording of their Thursday video call. In the larger window, her son stood over a paper bridge laid between two chairs. In the small window, Yansheng asked what it could hold. The boy put a toy bus on it. The bridge sagged. They both laughed, and Yansheng told him they would make a wider one at the weekend.
Yanchuan watched the background instead of his brother’s face: a pale wall, a curtain, a corner of a suitcase. Nothing that could locate a man. Nothing that belonged to a stranger preparing to vanish.
“Don’t put that in the public appeal,” An said.
He looked up. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Someone asked for something emotional. A colleague. They said people share a child more quickly.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That my son isn’t a noticeboard.”
She closed the video. On her desk lay a folder of supplier invoices for the job she was still trying to keep. One customer had asked why she was late reconciling an account. She had typed a reply explaining everything, then replaced it with a revised delivery time.
Yanchuan offered to call the customer. She shook her head.
“You can bring dinner when you come. That would help.”
He booked a train for that evening. On the way to the station, he called his sister in Guangzhou. Qiao was between shifts; a machine beeped steadily behind her.
“Listen to An,” she said. “Don’t arrive with a plan that gives her more work.”
“Everyone thinks I’m going to do that.”
“Are they wrong?”
He looked at the list of questions on his phone and removed six.
At An’s apartment, his nephew opened the door holding one half of a cardboard road. Yanchuan’s dinner bags swung against his knees.
“Baba said you know about bridges.”
“Only some kinds.”
“This one has to turn.”
They worked on the floor while An answered another call. Yanchuan heard the same dates repeated, then a request to send them again. He fastened the road with tape. The first join broke when the boy drove a bus over it. They used a wider strip and tried again.
After the child slept, An showed him a receipt for a deposit on a small birthday outing the following month. Yansheng had paid it before leaving and sent her the confirmation. She had not remembered it until she searched his old messages.
“It doesn’t prove he couldn’t change his mind,” she said.
“No.”
“But they keep saying private plans as if that explains anything. These were his private plans.”
They added the receipt to the file, together with the call and the promised school pickup. Ordinary commitments. None could tell them what happened after Thursday. Together they made it harder to describe his absence as a simple choice without asking another question.
Yanchuan washed the dishes. He tightened nothing, replaced nothing, and left the blue bowl where An had put it. When the tap dripped, he could hear how long it had been since the last drop.